“A new study shows that most people prefer that self-driving cars be programmed to save the most people in the event of an accident, even if it kills the driver,” reports Information Week. “Unless they are the drivers.” Slashdot reader MojoKid quotes an article from Hot Hardware about the new study, which was published by Science magazine.

A few Tesla vehicles have had accidents with Autopilot enabled recently, and I’ve gotten countless questions about these incidents and the nature of Autopilot from people who aren’t Tesla owners. Tesla and the media haven’t clearly communicated what these features do (and don’t do) to the public, so I’ll try to help in whatever small way I can as a Model S owner for a few months so far.

I apologize in advance if I get any technical details wrong about these features. Authoritative information is hard to find, and these features change and evolve often.

The first known death caused by a self-driving car was disclosed by Tesla Motors on Thursday, a development that is sure to cause consumers to second-guess the trust they put in the booming autonomous vehicle industry.

A team made up of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Georgetown University, have created a technique capable of compromising a mobile device via voice commands embedded into a YouTube video. The signal is imperceptible to viewers, but is able to trigger commands within a nearby device, whether a laptop, computer, smart TV, smartphone or tablet. On Apple systems, Siri receives the message and on Android systems, Google Now interprets the signal.

In the past week or so I’ve had three instances to reflect on how three major tech companies talk about diversity hiring and their actions. One pattern that continues to repeat itself is that companies say a lot about how much diversity is important to them and wanting to hire more underrepresented minorities but then can’t get out of the rut of their ingrained hiring practices.

Facebook Inc. said Thursday that it made meager increases in the number of women and minorities working at the social-network giant, highlighting the difficulty large tech companies have in diversifying their workforces.

Ransomware is bad enough, but offers a sliver of hope to victims by promising to give them their files back if they obey instructions — with the exception of a new strain which has been created for money and nothing else.

Debugging woes as a deveoper

Lyle chats about a bug he is trying to fix at work which he seems to blame on a bug inAVPlayer Class Reference callback for completed sounds. Looking for redemption he speculates a similar bug in Pokemon Go caused be the same issue.